A tapeless workflow has huge advantages over working with video tape. Transfer of footage from the camera to the edit system is far quicker, If you digitise tape it takes 1 hour to digitise 1 hour, with tapeless systems it can take less than 4 minutes to copy the footage. Tapeless cameras can also record for far longer continuous times, and don’t suffer dropout. They are also more robust than units with a tape drive.
P2 from Panasonic, XDCAM and SxS from Sony promise easier workflows than ever before. In a short space of time we will see camcorder tapes as obsolete as cassettes in our music collection.
It’s not all plain sailing, without decent organisation, the good ship ‘Tapeless’ could capsize and lose your footage overboard. Your feet could be tangled in the sea-weed tendrils of tape at the bottom of the ocean of data - Yes – I know – one analogy too far!
What is Tapeless.
Blinking obvious isn’t it, tapeless means having no tape. Recording onto a medium that is not magnetic particles glued on to a thin plastic tape that is moved past a magnetic head mechanically. Yes, I know you could call Film ‘tapeless’, but only if you are willing to risk me drowning you in developer for being such a smart-alec.
Tapeless for the purpose of this piece is recording video straight on to optical disks, hard drives or memory cards.
Can I go tapeless with my old camera?
Yes – add a FireStore to a DV camera with a FireWire output and you can record hours straight to the internal hard drive in the correct format for your editing program. A Datavideo DN-300 even has analogue inputs.
HDV Cameras like the Sony Z1 can also become tapeless thanks to FireStores and DN300s, allowing them to record over 3 hours in one go.
No more frenzied tape changing, no dropout, no waiting hours for digitising.
There are even special FireStores for recording DVCPRO HD via FireWire from Panasonic P2 cameras.
The new FS-5 will even let you add information wirelessly to your clips as you shoot them.
The FS-5 can store 7 ½ hours of footage so the ability to add metadata (written information) can speed up logging and editing greatly. Imagine you are filming student graduations, you can add the name of each student in metadata as you are shooting via your laptop, I Phone or other wireless device. When you come to edit the shot will be easy to find.
You are really sorted now – saving hours of digitising and tape changing you spend all this extra time building a model of The London Eye out of Toothpicks. It wins a competition and you meet Kiera Knightly at the prize giving, who is so impressed she decides to marry you.
6 months pass, Kiera is away again filming Pirates 8 and one of your clients want you to re-edit their video because their product no longer contains Asbestos. Now where is your tape? Ah – your tapeless now, where is the file? I kept it on an old FireWire drive somewhere, oh no, not the one that makes the funny grinding noise? The one that I sent off under warranty because it no longer is recognised by Windows, the one you backed up with by using seventy DVD’s, the DVD’s are now acting as bird scarers on your allotment because you forgot to label them, and your trousers have vanished, and the exam is in 10 minutes and you haven’t revised. What a nightmare!
OK I’m being flippant, but I do really know what it’s like to loose footage, that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realise you are going to have to make a depressing phone call to a client.
Tapeless Workflow can only work if you are really well organised.
In the days of tape based production there was probably a cardboard box, with all the rushes, the voice over and music tapes, the script and graphics on a CD or DVD, this is no longer the case.
There are 3 options.
1.) Hope – Hope that everything will be OK – that you will find any necessary footage around your network and on odd drives in cupboard, hope that the drives still work, hope that no-one else in the office has erased it by accident or in a fit of jealousy over Kiera. Hope that you might be able to cut around the final edit, without relaying the VO and Music.
2.) Faith – Faith in the slightly antisocial, science fiction loving, monosyllabic IT support network manager will tell you where he has backed up the files in a straight forward way- not in Klingon.
3.) Certainty – 80 man years have gone into the development of the ProxSys Digital Asset Management system, put a clip into this and you will be able to find it, view it, download it, use it.
ProxSys is unique in that footage can be accessed from anywhere in the world via a web browser based interface, so you can now follow Kiera to the Caribbean and edit there!
Turnkey ProxSys Asset Management Systems start at £15,000 for a small production company and there are more scalable solutions for broadcasters, teaching hospitals or anywhere with a large video archive. ProxSys now has fantastic support for XDCAM EX as well as P2.
Goodluck with keeping track of your clips, I'm off to edit my holiday video from 2000. Now where did I put those tapes?
